AT LARGE: Revolutions and protests are nothing new

Sunday

Mar 6, 2011 at 2:28 AM

With revolutions and mass protests breaking out across the globe, I looked around and found a couple of databases that purported to list all the revolutions and rebellions and coups d’états and “coup attempts,” following the end of World War II.

By Tommy Stevenson

With revolutions and mass protests breaking out across the globe in such far-flung paces as Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, the Sudan, Madison, Wis., and Columbus, Ohio, I looked around and found a couple of databases that purported to list all the revolutions and rebellions and coups d’états and “coup attempts,” following the end of World War II.Actually, the databases went back to the beginning of recorded human history, with the first revolution entry in 2380 BC when “a popular revolt in the Sumerian city of Lagash deposes King Lugalanda and puts reformer Urkagina on the throne.”The first coup listed was in 509 BC when “members of the Tarquin Dynasty led by Lucius Junius Brutus overthrew King of Rome Lucius Tarquinius.”That is not, by the way, the same Brutus who slipped the shiv to Julius Caesar; that happened in 44 BC.I concentrated my research on the post-WWII period since that was the largest war and, for the most part, shaped the world as we know it.But I was shocked to find that since 1945 there have been no fewer than 146 revolutions and rebellions, and 203 coups and attempted coups in every corner of the world, including the United States, which, of course, had its own country-defining rebellion in the Civil War of the 1860s.Did you know, for instance, that in 1946 there was a conflict in Tennessee known variously as the “McMinn County War” and the “Battle of Athens,” which was successful in throwing out the corrupt local political machine?According to one account, citizens “including some World War II veterans, accused local officials of political corruption and voter intimidation” and were successful in overturning the local government.(Hum, I wonder if they know about the Battle of Athens in Greensboro?)The database also dubiously lists “The Days of Rage” in Chicago in 1969 when the radical Weathermen “led an uprising of around 300 students quickly suppressed by police.”Curiously, there is no mention of the much more violent “police riot” at the 1968 Democratic Convention in the same city.The height of domestic violence in the United States came during the early days of the labor movement, with battles fought from the coal mines to the assembly lines, but that was mostly in the 1920s and ’30s, before the events discussed here.In browsing through the 43 pages of revolutions and coups, I quickly realized that World War II did not set the whole world in stone.The Cuban Revolution culminating in 1959 certainly changed geo-politics once Fidel Castro aligned his country with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, as did the 1945 revolution in which Ho Chi Minh wrested control of Vietnam from the French and adopted the communist model of governance.And, of course, the Chinese Revolution, in which Chairman Mao Zedong took over the largest country in the world and imposed a sort of cult-of-personality communism, can’t be overlooked, nor can the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution, which overthrew the U.S.-installed and backed Shah and still is proving problematic for the rest of the world.The late 1980s and early ’90s were filled with revolution as the Soviet Union finally began to break apart.In 1989, there was the so-called non-violent “Singing Revolutions” as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declared themselves no longer Soviet satellites, mostly by gathering in large numbers and, well, singing songs of liberation.In 1989, there were the bloodless “Velvet Revolution” (named after an American rock band) in Czechoslovakia and the Romanian Revolution, which didn’t turn out too well for dictator Nicolae Ceaucesue and his wife, Elena, who were hanged in a public square on Christmas day.The above are just an American-centric smattering of upheaval in the world in the past 66 years.To tell the truth, there have been riots and revolutions in every corner of the world, from Greece (1945-49) to Paraguay (1947) to India (numerous occasions) to the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (in the 1950s) to “The Troubles” in Ireland from 1969 to 1998.Places you may never hear of or could locate on a map have also had their rebellions: Aden, Zanzibar, Guinea, the New Hebrides, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Ingushetia, just to name a few.Alfred Lord Tennyson described “Nature, red in tooth and claw” in his lengthy “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” written in 1850, in which he contrasts the natural world with “civilized” mankind without ever drawing a distinct conclusion about which is superior.But looking over the sweep of history just since the end of World War II, it would be difficult to conclude that man, with the teeth of cruise missiles and claws of Abrams tanks, has spilled much more blood than his natural counterpart.And is still doing so.